Chiwitel Ejiofor – BAFTA Life in Pictures

He’s been working with great directors and with so many good actors, it made perfect sense, I theorised, that he should now be director and starring in his own film. As his debut movie, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, premiered on Netflix, I took the BAFTA crowd through clips of Amistad (Chiwitel’s remarkable debut, picked by Spielberg while still at drama school, which he then quit), Dirty Pretty Things, Kinky Boots, Dancing on the Edge (his TV film with Stephen Poliakoff), 12 Years a Slave (he had us all in tears again….) and The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. Chiwitel spoke movingly about basing his performance in Dirty Pretty Things on his late father, and of the importance of Africa in his work, as well as finishing with a great answer to an audience member’s question about harnessing emerging black talent here in the UK.